En la Terraza

Alejandro Carrillo Etienne

     Twenty things I've realized while discussing language, translation, and poetics with Mexican poet and translator Alejandro Carrillo Etienne on his terazza in Guadalajara, Jalisco evenings:

1) the more sources the better.
2) beware of those who subscribe to a single poetics.
3) the parrots in Guadalajara are very big and mostly green.
4) Ashbery's comment on Gertrude Stein's Stanzas in Meditation that they are a "hymn to possibility" somehow ceases neither to be beautiful, nor haunting.
5) double negatives are confusing in Spanish and in English, and generally not a good idea.
6) do not cross the street in Guadalajara with out looking both ways twice.
7) Mexican poetry is unfairly invisible to most estadounidenses.
8) languages create false borders.
9) Mexican beer is shit but it's better to drink than Mexican water.
10) write.
11) any style (form) is a style (form) of possibility.
12) content is not important.
13) form is not important.
14) citrus flowers in the evening can be overwhelming, it's okay.
15) form and content are everything.
16) chilis are a sacred fruit.
17) you know the music is there and that it will come to you, but you have to be ready for it, you have to do the work. (Philip Glass)
18) all schools in the americas should be bilingual, north and south, except in Portugal where they should be trilingual.
19) the more you read, the more you can draw from.
20) the moon is bigger and fuller in Mexico than it is in the U.S. - that's just true.